Women in Sales Blog

I am trying to write more articles here to help sales reps sell smarter and better. I know that most people don't have time or don't want to read long, drawn out articles. So I am going to try hard to write quick articles with quick tips at least a couple of times a week. So let me know what you think.

Quick sales prospecting tip of the day:

How to use Google Alerts to sell smarter and sell more timely to your leads and opportunities.

Every time you source a lead or decide to start working a lead you should create a Google alert right away under that company name. That way any time something is indexed in Google under that company name you can get a notification that something happened at the company/lead you are working. These notifications will over time start to help you to have more and better reasons to reach out to your leads other than the generic reasons like "just following up" or "just checking in." YUCK. Those are the worst because you really have nothing valuable to say to the lead so you use those words to hopefully give you a reason to reach out and not sound desperate but really in fact it does sound desperate.

Here is what my Google alerts folder looks like in my gmail.

Steps to creating Google Alerts:

Once you decide that you are going to work a company/lead you will go to Google alerts and search the company name.

Setting up a Google alert should look like this. Once you search the company name it will show you some search results of recent articles/pages indexed with those keyword sets or with that company's name. Then you will just click create alert. THAT IS IT! That takes probably 2 seconds, right? So now you need to do that every single time you start to work a lead. Make it part of your process, every single time.

2. Okay so now we have created the Google alert. Next step, setup a folder in your gmail labeled Google alerts and have all of the alerts get sent there.

When you have time either in the morning or afternoon/night to go through them you will start to see good nuggets of information about your leads and opps you are following. These nuggets or "trigger events" will start to shape the way you will reach out to your leads and opps moving forward.

You should take the information and add that information to your research in your notes on the lead or opp and use it to reach out out in a smarter more timely way to your leads and opps.

If you take this one step every time you decide to work a lead you will start to acquire great information about the companies you are working and prospecting. This will help you to sell smarter and better. You will have real reasons to reach back out to the company you are working. You will be able to show value to your leads because you are more knowledgeable of what is going on with their company.